Electronic computing devices have become increasingly important to data computation, analysis and storage in our modern society. Modern direct access storage devices (DASDs), such as hard disk drives (HDDs), are heavily relied on to store mass quantities of data for purposes of future retrieval. As such long term data storage has become increasingly popular, and as the speed of microprocessors has steadily increased over time, the need for HDDs with greater storage capacity to store the increased amount of data has also steadily increased.
Hard disk drive devices are configured with read/write heads for reading data from and writing data to rotating disks. During operation, at times the heads and disks come into contact. Sometimes this contact is unintentional or undesirable, e.g., due to an asperity on a disk or slider vibration modes, and sometimes the contact is intentional, e.g., to calibrate and manage the fly height of the heads over the disks such as with thermal fly height (TFC) control. Regardless, even if the head-disk contact is intentional, such contact can cause excessive heat, wear, friction, burnishing and/or other damage to the heads, as well as damage to the disks. This is especially true when the heads and disks contact with significant force. For at least these reasons, managing the contact forces between read/write heads and disks in a hard disk drive is desirable.